A sentence I never imagined I’d write: I now think Jeremy Corbyn did Jews in Britain a favour. His time as Labour leader, between 2015 and 2020, was an extremely weird one for British Jews, but eye-opening all the same: …
How to survive the Tory apocalypse
When Ford Madox Ford died in June 1939, a few weeks before Europe compelled itself once again to go to war, only three people turned up to his funeral. In an obituary, Graham Greene compared his fellow writer’s passing to …
The truth about Britain’s teenage terrorists
To read a British newspaper or to listen to the rhetoric of counter-terrorism police, you could be forgiven for thinking that the country has incubated a new generation of child extremists. And not just any child extremists: unlike previous moral …
Why Meloni is rewriting Italy’s constitution
At first glance, the Italian constitution reads like soulless legalese: a thicket of jargon and impenetrable articoli. But the power it wields should not be underestimated. La Costituzione dictates the way the peninsula is governed — and, if rewritten as …
How long will Rochdale cling to Galloway?
“There are too many bloomin’ blacks,” the florist, perched behind her stall on Rochdale’s high street, says without a hint of shame. Her friend interjects: “They sit around here drinking and doing drugs… There are no police about. We need …
The complicated truth about being stalked
The teeth were the detail that stuck with me. A friend had gone to the sentencing of the woman who stalked me — I can’t really call her “my stalker”, because she turned out to have many victims and I …
Will the English ever revolt?
In The Return of the Native, Hardy observes of the mummers’ St George play that the proof it is a genuine folk tradition lies in the sullen joylessness with which it is carried out, “which sets one wondering why …
Why London is beating America’s cities
As America’s cities continue to decline, as even ardent boosters warn of “an urban doom loop”, how does London remain a global powerhouse? The straightforward answer is that it retains an old advantage: its origins as a former imperial capital.…
Would Kant really support BLM?
Poor old Immanuel Kant, scourge of many an undergraduate essay crisis, whose 300th birthday fell this week. Was ever any other major intellectual figure put through so much painful contemporary “rethinking”?
According to the late political theorist Charles W. Mills, …
Dungeness is England’s last hope
I spent St George’s Day watching Derek Jarman’s The Last of England. The film is an apocalypse of sorts. It reveals what is to come. More importantly, it reveals what is already here. An opening monologue tries to pin down …
How Parklife skewered the Nineties
If Damon Albarn was telling the truth, and Saturday’s Coachella performance was Blur’s “last gig”, it was a miserable swansong. A field of influencers (some of whom appeared to not know who Blur are) crowded into the most corporatised festival …
Zombie knives: a metaphor for Britain
Another day, another report of a child stabbing another child. On this occasion, it was a 15-year-old girl in the comprehensive school in the former mining valley of Ammanford in Wales. She left three injured, including a fellow pupil, seriously …
Will Jamie Driscoll beat Labour in the North East?
It was a scene to bring back memories not just of the Jeremy Corbyn era, but the full-blooded Labour struggles of the Seventies and Eighties — a time when the unions terrified governments of both colours, and when the hard-Left …
How the police lost control of London
Even in supposedly secular and tolerant London, the safety of Jews has recently come to seem an unnervingly fragile thing. Last week, a London police officer was filmed threatening to arrest a man for being “openly Jewish”, and there have …
How vice consumed Blackpool
Every online review for one of Blackpool’s brothels tells a sordid story. “I plan to visit nightly,” writes a punter whose wife has just died. “A depressing hovel,” claims another who took a teddy bear with him. A third admits …
